Justin du Coeur

Word just went out on Facebook that Countess Aiden has passed away. It's a bit of a shock -- I hadn't heard that anything was up but then, I haven't had much contact with her in recent years.

You know how people will sometimes talk about the first King (or Baron) who really made a powerful positive impression on them being "their King"? Aiden was Caitlin's and my Kingdom Officer, the person who defined for us how you do the job. Caitlin was well-known as the Institutional Memory of the East, but we were always conscious that she had picked that job up from Aiden -- when we were getting involved at the Kingdom level, Aiden was the Kingdom's Lawspeaker, in much the same way that Kali was Carolingia's: she was the person who not only knew *what* the laws were, but *why* they had been written that way in the first place, and by whom. Long after she stepped down as Kingdom Seneschal, she was the calm voice in Curia saying, "Your Majesty, I think there's a better way to do that".

We were never terribly close to her, but we learned a lot simply by watching her and learning by her example. She was an important force for coherence and sanity in the Kingdom, and one of my exemplars of the Order of the Rose: courteous but forceful. She will be missed...

Very sad to hear this. Aiden was Ostgardr way back when, and the person who showed by example "How to do Seneschal" as much as Patri showed "How to do Baron."

And when the mood struck, she was supremely good at "Silly." I'll never forget the ride to Pennsic VI, when she and Embla piled me on top of the luggage in the back seat of Aiden's subcompact car, having agreed to delay their own departure until I was free from work. "You can't register now," said the volunteer at Troll, looking at the post-midnight time. "Sure I can," said Aiden - I've got baggage, including the Queen." Without her I'd never have made it there, certainly not in as bumptious a mood.

Silly

I was never much of a policy wonk. All of my memories tend toward her humorous side. I remember her along with the (no way I can spell it) Duraka folks at Mel and Gyrth's coronation: "You're the greatest, you're the best. You have beaten all the rest. We'll obey your every word, and to you we pledge our swerd." She sang along to the "Hail Setanta Chorus" at their own coronation. Driving a carload of us across Staten Island on the way back from an event, Auntie Aiden kept dropping sly hints about having known one of the other passengers (name escapes me) before the SCA. I thought about the timing of her university years and said "Was it the SDS?" It was. I don't remember when she became Auntie Aiden, but it must have been by the early 1980s. Sigh.